FireEye: 184 Countries Now Host Malware Command and Control Servers

FireEye recently published a new report entitled "The Advanced Cyber Attack Landscape," which examines the 184 counties that house command and control servers for malware (a previous report in 2010 had found 130 countries hosting command and control servers).

According to the report, fully 89 percent of all advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks are associated with tools developed by Chinese hacker groups, and technology firms are the leading targets for APT attacks.

Sixty-six percent of command and control servers for APT attacks are hosted in the United States, according to FireEye, indicating that the US is the top target for such attacks -- command and control servers are often hosted in the target country in order to help avoid detection.

The report also found that the Asian countries of China, South Korea, India, Japan and Hong Kong together account for 24 percent of all global callbacks to command and control servers, and the Eastern European countries of Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Latvia together account for 22 percent.

"The threat landscape has evolved, as cyber threats have outpaced traditional signature-based security defenses, such as anti-virus, and permeated around the world, enabling cybercriminals to easily evade detection and establish connections inside the perimeter of major organizations," FireEye CEO David DeWalt said in a statement.